President Obama uses it, Ashton Kutcher aces it and it’s an act that everyone worth his salt is getting an account to access it. What used to be long blogs and heavily-worded articles have come to this.
I must say that in the scheme of things of how Homo Sapiens are destroying the planet, converting our arable rainforests to arid lands and leaving a poor legacy behind, twitting probably counts as something that we got right. For once, in this background-noise-overladen cities that we live in, it forces us to keep our sharings to 140 characters or less as one twit. Of course, we can always submit multiple twits but then, it would potray ourselves as narcisstic, poor language users who couldn’t express ourselves elegantly and succintly.
Witness the use of it as instantaneous updates of news as it happened. As chaos started in the recent parliamentary meeting after Datuk Seri Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin was sworn in as Bukit Gantang MP, two lawmakers offered their version of the event via the social networking site Twitter.
Both first-term MP Khairy Jamaludin and veteran opposition leader Lim Kit Siang today competed against each other to report live from Parliament House, beating all media agencies, hands-down for round-the-clock, live updates.
To be able to report and share as it happens require a certain mastery of language skills and acuity of mind, hallmarks of a good writer. Now, perhaps , we need to ask our students to start twitting as one of their assignments for clarity of sentence constructions.
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